


my love, forsaken

by lulla_lunekjaer



Category: Hamlet - Shakespeare
Genre: Angst, Backstory, Drowning, Flowers, I wrote this for school, Symbolism, gratuitous use of commas, i guess, it's going in the tag, probably some tense mix-ups here
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-31
Updated: 2018-05-31
Packaged: 2019-05-16 09:24:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,892
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14808632
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lulla_lunekjaer/pseuds/lulla_lunekjaer
Summary: That night, she dreamt of the river, flowing fast and dangerous, and of that blossom of rue being pulled under again and again, until it seemed that she was the flower. The water closed over her head and filled her lungs when she tried to breathe. She sunk deeper and deeper, until all she could see was the blossom of rue, floating far above her. It no longer hurt. All she could see was the little flower, now no more than a speck above her, and she was at peace. Ophelia closed her eyes -





	my love, forsaken

**Author's Note:**

> please enjoy my gratuitous Ophelia feels

Ophelia was born on the shortest, coldest day of the year. There were no flowers to be tossed on her mother’s grave. She was a minor noblewoman, a great friend to the queen, but not distinguished enough to warrant anything beyond the typical proceedings. A good, Christian burial. Laertes cried. Ophelia did too, but she was tucked up in the castle with a wet nurse, and everyone expected babies to cry. Her brother would remember that day for the rest of his life. Ophelia never would, and how could she?

What Ophelia did remember is the sense of sadness that had settled over their whole household that week and never left. She grew up in it, as her father grasped more and more at the strings of his power and her brother strained more and more at her father’s hold on him. Ophelia did too, but not in ways their father could detect. 

 

On Midsummer's Day, she went out to join the peasants in their celebrations. 

“You know,” one of the local girls had said, “the old women say that if you pick seven different flowers on your way home and put them under your pillow, you’ll dream about your husband.” The others had scoffed, saying that it was a pagan superstition and that they were good Christian girls who had never even heard of such rituals. But Ophelia saw how they all leaned closer, listened more carefully. She saw the glint in their eyes. She knew she would not be the only girl joining in the revelry. 

She slipped in among them and grabbed part of the flower rope, roses and columbines, pansies and rosemary, violets and daisies, and little rue, sprinkled throughout. A boy grabbed a cluster of rue and tried to place it in her hair. Ophelia laughed and danced away from him, and the rue fell to the ground, where it was trampled underfoot. 

And then the party reached the river, which was running slow and steady. Ophelia bent over the water and saw her reflection stare back up at her. A few blossoms of rue had managed to still remain stuck in her hair. She shook her head, laughing again, and one fell into the river, where it was immediately pulled under. She skipped off to take hold of the rope of flowers again. 

They followed the river to the sea, where a bonfire was already smouldering. She danced with village girls and boys, and feasted on fresh berries and wine until the sun began to sink below the horizon and men and women to slink off into the shadows. There would be many high summer weddings and Easter-born children the next year, she thought. 

Slowly, Ophelia wandered home. She had picked six of the seven flowers when she heard a voice.

“Ophelia?” Prince Hamlet and some of his friends were outside the castle gate, lounging on the grass. They were still only boys, but she noticed several had long knives strapped to their belts, and Hamlet a full rapier. She giggled through her hand and smiled drunkenly at them. 

“What are you doing out here? It’s after dark.”

“Shhhhhhh,” she whispered, pressing her finger to his lips. “I need one more flower.” She showed them the ones in her hand, the violet a little crushed but still recognizable. 

“Well then,” he said, “you surely can’t go without on Midsummer.” Hamlet had heard the old women’s tales too and had scoffed at them like all the rest, but Ophelia was younger, he reasoned, and fanciful, and a girl. He didn’t yet know the power that girls held. There was one blossom of rue that yet clung to her hair. He plucked it from its position and placed it in her hand. 

“There,” he said, smiling in a way that did not quite reach his eyes, “will that do for your dreams?” 

Ophelia smiled.”It will do.” Swaying slightly, she started again towards home. 

That night, she dreamt of the river, flowing fast and dangerous, and of that blossom of rue being pulled under again and again, until it seemed that she was the flower. The water closed over her head and filled her lungs when she tried to breathe. She sunk deeper and deeper, until all she could see was the blossom of rue, floating far above her. It no longer hurt. All she could see was the little flower, now no more than a speck above her, and she was at peace. Ophelia closed her eyes - 

\- and woke up in disarray, tangled in her blanket, the seven flowers strewn around her pillow like a crown. 

When she asked Hamlet’s friends, none of them seemed to remember seeing her the night before. The prince himself would only smile at her. 

“It was Midsummer, Ophelia,” he said, “who knows what really happened?”

In her mind, the whole encounter seemed to take on a dreamlike countenance, the edges blurring, although that could have been the wine. 

It must have been a dream, she thought to herself, and I will marry Hamlet some day. It pleased her, because although Hamlet did not know the value of girls, he was right that she was a romantic. Hamlet must have been the Midsummer dream, and she would love him. 

But the feeling of the river closing over her head haunted her, however much she tried to put it out of her head. 

She doesn’t think of where the seventh flower came from. 

 

Bolstered by the thought that it was preordained, she began to attach herself to the Danish prince by whatever means she could. She sat next to him when the players came visiting, and hung around his room in the castle.

“Ophelia?” 

Gertrude the Queen had never forgotten her dear friend who had, in life and death, been Ophelia’s mother. Still, she was surprised to see the girl in the royal apartments, when she had previously shown no interest in the ruling family. Ignorant of both children and other people’s desires, she came to the only conclusion she could - that Ophelia was at last taking an interest in the one thing that Gertrude could give her: memories.

“Come, girl, sit with me by the fire.” 

The Queen pulled her embroidery out of a bag and handed Ophelia a hoop and thread. 

“Your mother,” she began, “was first and foremost a lady of God. She would have been heartbroken to know what had happened to Him in her own country.”

Ophelia, suddenly feeling ashamed at believing in such things as Midsummer dreams, nodded.

“Second,” Gertrude smiled, “she was a lady of great refinement and grace. Never at a loss for what to say. No one could ever hate her, and never was there a cruel word said about her. After she died, they said that she had done her duty by God and her husband and that He took her back.” She looked down at her feet, then at Ophelia. “Do you know your duty, girl?” 

“To obey God in all things, and to marry and honor my family.” she answered. 

Gertrude sighed softly, as if she were remembering some other time, some other girl. 

“Remember this,” she said, poking a needle with blood-red thread through her hoop, “That they are not always the same thing. Remember that you, too, are God’s child.” 

The Queen looked her in the eye, and Ophelia nodded, although she was uncertain. 

“Now,” Gertrude said, “let me tell you about how your father courted your mother.” 

Ophelia scooted closer to hear, looking down at the fabric she had been given. It was as green as the sea. 

 

Laertes came to her one day, his face shining. 

“Sister, you will never guess what has happened to me!” 

“You’re off to fight the Norwegians with the King, dressed in armor of solid gold, with a sword that shines with diamonds,” Ophelia teased.

“No,” he said, lifting her and spinning her around. “Father has finally granted my request! I’m going to France to study, and I will write you every day.” 

“Oh,” Ophelia said. “You’re leaving.” 

“Yes,” he said. “Ophelia, I’m so happy!” 

He was escaping, is what he was doing. Ophelia had found escape from the house and its sadness in the form of Gertrude and Hamlet, but Laertes was leaving it all behind. Leaving her behind. 

She smiled, in the way that all women know how to smile when they need someone to think they are happy. 

Laertes had been her protector as a child, and although in recent years she had felt she had outgrown him, she felt the pang of missing him already, like a child told that a toy they have not played with in years is to be taken away. 

“I’m happy for you,” she said.

 

Ophelia sat with Hamlet on the bank of the river, weaving flowers together into a crown. She meant to put it on his head when she was finished. He read to her out loud from some book of poetry; she wasn’t particularly paying attention to it, she was noticing the way his lips moved, how they formed the sounds that made the words and sentences and stanzas, how his eyes lit up on just the right word.

She thinks, suddenly, that she loves this man. Not his child self, who gave her a flower in a dream moment, and not the prince and royalty, and not who he would become, dark with death and revenge. She loved the man sitting with her then in that moment, reading her ancient poetry. She drew breath to tell him so, and -

“Ophelia,” he said, and she sighed, and smiled at him. 

“I’m going to college, in Wittenberg. I don’t know when I’ll be back.” His eyes were pleading, like he didn’t know how she would react. 

If there was going to be a moment, this would have been it. She sits and waits, for a promise, for a ring, for him to say anything to her, anything, for her mother to descend from heaven and carry her up with her, for him to go back to reading poetry, for the whole world to turn on its side, or for someone to laugh. 

He says nothing, and quietly, she begins to cry. He gathers her into his arms, but remains silent still. She hears a distant thunderclap, although it has not yet begun to rain.

In her hands, a link in the flower crown comes undone, and the whole thing falls to pieces. 

 

Ophelia loved her father, for all that he was old and sad and missed her mother and her brother more than he ever missed her. She doted on him, and with her help and influence, he was awarded a seat on the king’s council. She learned politics from him, how to manipulate and deceive without actually manipulating or deceiving. And she learned love. A different kind of love from what the others had taught her - a cautious love, the only way, she was told, to be sure that you are not burned. To be sure that I am not burned or that you are not, she wanted to ask him, but her own cautious love for him would not permit it, and the question was forgotten.

 

King Hamlet died, and Ophelia dressed in mourning black like the rest of them. At his funeral, Gertrude the Queen weeped, and the king’s brother comforted her.

“Ophelia,” Gertrude asked her, as they embroidered together, black on black on black, “remember what I told you, that duty is not always obeying?”

Ophelia did, and she understood more of it now. 

“In the days to come,” the queen said, for she was still the queen, and forever would be in the memories of the people, “remember that.”

Three weeks later, the court dressed all in reds and greens and blues for the wedding of their queen and their sovereign, and Ophelia knew that she had lost an ear. 

 

Her beloved Hamlet returned, but he was different, and sad, like her father. He no longer trusted her as once he did. Laertes, too, had no more use for her. She was Only Ophelia, after all. 

After Hamlet came another from Wittenberg, Horatio, and it seemed to her that she remembered him from somewhere. From a dream, perhaps. 

They met in the library one day, she searching for that little book of poetry that had caused such heartbreak, he looking for a treatise on ghosts, of all things. 

“Hello,” he said. “I don’t think I’ve caught your name.”

“Ophelia,” she said, and looked him in the eye.

“Horatio,” he said, “a friend of the prince’s from college.” 

“A friend?” she asked. It had been years since Hamlet had had any she considered his friends. 

“Yes, he and I and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, whom you have no doubt seen torturing a shuttlecock in the gardens.” 

“I see,” Ophelia said. 

“I’m sorry, have I offended you?” he asked her.

“No, not at all, kind sir, it is just . . . my lord Hamlet . . .” It had been years since she had thought of him as titled. 

“Oh,” said Horatio, and she had the suspicion that he knew exactly what she was thinking. “I understand.” He bowed, and left her alone to wonder. 

 

He gave back her letters. All those long years, and all the letters, from hand to hand within the castle at Elsinore and by horse over long counties to Wittenberg, all of them. She cried, and he shouted at her, and her father did not understand, could not understand, and she still did not understand why Claudius the King was so intent on her. She took the letters, every one of them, back to her room and slowly, methodically, burned them. The fire crept up one side, then down the other, until his words to her and hers to him were all ashes spiraling up the chimney. 

“It is midnight, and the time is passing, but I sleep alone,” she whispered to herself. 

Is there a point, she thought, in living? Who was there left to her to live for? Who was there for her to confide in? Was there ever anyone?

 

The court grew stranger every day, until Ophelia could no longer abide it. She was hot and cold in turns, flirty and frigid, generous and stingy with her love. If Hamlet could cast her off, she thought, then surely it was her right, her duty, to not love him. To forsake him. She burned the letters and her love, though the ashes remained. They tasted bitter in her mouth. 

She could not go on any longer, she was ready to beg him, to beg them all, to prostrate herself before the entire Danish court and beg for their mercy, when - 

 

All the violets died with her father. This is all that Ophelia knew, this and that she had to tell someone, but there was no one there, not anymore. Maybe there never was.

She remembered the flowers, crushed in her hot palm and spread on her pillow. She remembered the rue, the way it fell into the water. 

She thought she saw Laertes, but no, he had abandoned her, he is surely still in France. She saw Gertrude the Queen, as a girl with her mother and as the sad woman at the altar, and she thought to offer her the rue, but what would she herself do with it? She saw Claudius the false king, for she saw now what he had done. All violets and all faithfulness had surely died with her father. 

 

Ophelia thought of Hamlet, and she did not know why he did not come to her.

“He has something to say, I know it,” she cried out. Someone answered her, but it was not him, and so she paid them no heed. 

No one came to her in her room, not even to stoke the ashes of her letters, the ashes of her heart. Ophelia heard laughter, and she remembered that bright Midsummer. 

She found herself staring down at her reflection in the river, the rue still clutched in her hand and in her hair and suddenly there were flowers all around her and in the river. The rue dropped from her hair, and for a moment, she knew what was going to happen before it did. 

There was a noise, and suddenly, Ophelia felt that she was the rue, and was carried away by the river. She thought she saw a flash of red, out of the corner of her eye, and someone running, crying after her, but it couldn’t have been. She was alone, she knew it.

She remembered Antinous, that ancient Roman, worshipped as a god after his death. She did not know if they would find her body, if they would bury it, if she would ever meet her mother. 

Ophelia remembered her mother, and how the wet nurse had told her that she had died in water. The thought comforted her. 

She looked up, and all she saw was that blossom of rue, all that was left of her life. Ophelia took one more breath, one more goodbye, and forgot her duty. She felt the water, all around her now, and it no longer hurt. Nothing hurt anymore.

Ophelia closed her eyes, and she was at peace. 


End file.
